Hotlink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.5 allows management of Hyper-V, KVM and XenServer through vCenter

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In recent times many companies are in the condition to plan the introduction of a second virtualization platform or even to have already the need to manage more than one.
Causes may be the most disparate: licensing costs, independence from a single vendor, processes optimization, etc.

Approaches to cross-virtualization also can be of different types.

There are three approaches that you can take to having one cross platform virtualization management strategy:

  • Assemble as management stack from best of breed third party solutions that support both of your virtualization platforms. For example, performance and capacity monitoring vendors like VKernel (now part of Quest Software), SolarWinds, VMTurbo, and Zenoss all support multiple virtualization platforms. Application Performance Management vendors like AppDynamics, New Relic, BlueStripe, Correlsense, and ExtraHop Networks tend to be agnostic of the underlying virtualization platform. Most backup vendors like Veeam support more than one hypervisor as well.
  • Standardize upon Microsoft SCOM as your management console, and then use plug-ins to SCOM (management packs) to support other virtualization platforms. For example you can use the Veeam nworks product to manage your VMware environment from within Micrsosoft SCOM. You can use the BlueStripe plugin to SCOM to manage all of the applications deployed across both VMware and Hyper-V virtualization platforms.
  • Use Hotlink, to extend the reach of vCenter to Hyper-V, KVM, and XenServer.

Hotlink SuperVISOR allows you to manage vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat KVM and Citrix XenServer all through a single vCenter console. Version 1.5 adds the following functionalities:

  • Snapshot Manager – Administrators can create, utilize, and manage cross-platform snapshots inside the VMware vCenter console – providing a single point of management for heterogeneous virtual machines
  • Template Manager – Users are able to create and deploy a single template across all target hypervisors, eliminating the time-consuming and inefficient process of building and maintaining platform-specific virtual machine templates
  • Homogenous Live Migration – VMware vCenter is now extended to provide live migration (e.g. vMotion) of Hyper-V, XenServer, and KVM virtual machines within homogeneous clusters – enabling the robust VMware management capabilities to be utilized for cross-platform, critical workloads


We recommend further reading of Bernd Harzog’s article.